Gay sex rings, child sex, forced the pope to quit

| Monday March 4, 2013 00:00

And it must have taken courage. There's been pious spin about a holy act of 'humility'. But one of Pope Benedict's  predecessors, sprightly Leo XIII, who died 110 years ago, went on until he was 93. Benedict knew from the start, aged 76, that he would grow old in office.  

We've heard about the so-called papal 'resignation' almost 600 years ago. But there wasn't one. There were three rival Popes back then, and one of them was a psychopath.  They were sacked by a council of all the bishops and cardinals to get back to one Pope at a time. Since then, every Pope has died in office. A report Benedict himself commissioned into the state of the Curia (Catholic Church's internal bureaucracy)  landed on his desk in January. It revealed that 'The Filth' - or more specifically, the paedophile priest scandal had entered the bureaucracy.He resigned in early February. That report was a final straw. The Filth has been corroding the soul of the Catholic Church for years, and the reason is the power-grabbing ineptitude and secrecy of the Curia - which failed to deal with the perpetrators. Now the Curia itself stands accused of being part of The Filth.    

Benedict realises the Curia must be reformed root and branch. He knows this is a mammoth task.He is too old, and too implicated, to clean it up himself. He has resigned to make way for a younger, more dynamic successor, untainted by scandal - and a similarly recast Curia. Benedict was not prepared to wait for his own death to sweep out the gang who run the place. In one extraordinary gesture, by resigning, he gets rid of the lot of them. But what then?

The Curia are usually quickly reappointed. This time it may be different. It involves scores of departments, like the civil service of a middling-sized country.

It has a Home and  Foreign Office called the Secretariat of State. There's a department that watches out for heresy - the former Holy Inquisition which under Cardinal Ratzinger dealt with, or failed to deal with, paedophile priests. And there is a Vatican Bank, the dubiously named Institute for Works of Religion (IOR), which was rocked by scandal in the early Eighties for links with the mafia.

The Curia is a big operation. It maintains contact with all the bishops of the world, more than 3,000, in 110 countries. The Curia oversees the hundreds of thousands of priests  who care for the world's 1.2 billion Catholics. The flow of information, and money, in and out of the Vatican is prodigious. What makes the bureaucrats different from normal executives is they don't go home and have another life.

Unless you're a full cardinal, with a nice flat and housekeeper, you go back on a bus to the microwave and TV in a Vatican-owned garret. Rivalries between departments, vendettas between individuals, naked ambition, calumny, backstabbing and intrigues are endemic.

The former president of the Vatican Bank, Archbishop Paul Marcinkus, once told me that the Curia is a  'village of washerwomen. They wash clothes, punch 'em, dance on 'em, squeezing all the old dirt out'. 

Not surprisingly, some of the bureaucrats let off steam in unpriestly ways. Some are actively gay men who cannot normalise their lives with a partner because of Catholic teaching.  They frequent discreet bars, saunas and 'safe houses'. On another level there are individuals known to have a weakness for sex with minors. It appears the people who procure these sexual services have become greedy. They have been putting the squeeze on their priestly clients to launder cash through the Vatican. There is no suggestion that the bank has knowingly collaborated. But in January, Italy's central bank suspended credit-card activities inside Vatican City for 'anti-money-laundering reasons'.

The Pope was already furious over the theft by his butler of private correspondence and top-secret papers last year. The thefts were probably an attempt to discover how much the Pope knew of malfeasance within the Curia. 

Then news of a Vatican sex ring and money scams reached his ears late last year. Benedict should not have been surprised. Hints of a seamy Vatican underworld have been surfacing for years. In March 2010, a 29-year-old chorister in St Peter's was sacked for allegedly procuring male prostitutes, one of them a seminarian, for a papal gentleman-in-waiting who was also a senior adviser in  the Curial department that oversees the church's worldwide missionary activities.

Last autumn Benedict ordered three trusted high-ranking cardinals to investigate the state of the Curia. This was the report that was delivered to him just weeks ago.

It was meant for Benedict's 'eyes only' but details of a sex ring and money-laundering scams last week reached the Italian weekly Panorama. Then the daily La Repubblica ran the story.(Dailymail.co.uk)